The present invention relates to techniques for expanding search queries and, more specifically, to identifying and expanding queries which are implicitly temporally qualified.
Search engines employ a variety of techniques in attempting to provide the most relevant search results in response to user search queries. At least some of these techniques attempt to make up for the fact that most search queries may be characterized by some level of inherent ambiguity. That is, when users formulate queries they often omit search terms which, if included, would yield search results more closely correlated with their actual intent. To deal with this, search engines often use information relating to the user (e.g., demographic and/or personal information, expressed preferences, geographic information, past online behavior, etc.) to order search results based on the assumption that this kind of information generally correlates to the intent implicit in a particular user's search queries.
However, while such techniques have been shown to have some general utility, they are not necessarily reflective of a particular user's implicit intent in specific instances, thus leading to rendering of search results not reflective of the user's intent and the possibility of negative user experience.